Thursday, December 02, 2010

Obama and American Mainstream Media Downplaying Wikileaks Released Documents While Gunning For Julian Assange & Other Whistleblowers

"A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea."

Meanwhile neoconservative Bill Kristol's sage advice to The Obama administration is simply to ignore Wikileaks latest released secret cables and other material. What the government does he asserts is not the business of the average citizens of America. In other words he believes that the political class and their elitist enablers do not have to answer to the people.

Kristol and his ilk don’t believe they’re answerable to anyone but other members of the “political class” – because, don’t you know, they’re above reproach, or criticism of any kind. Sniffy disdain is the only possible response to any attempt to question their royal prerogatives. These Bourbons have learned nothing in the past decade, during which their failed policies have visited disaster on American foreign policy and the peoples of the Middle East – and, what’s more, they don’t care to learn anything. They would rather close their eyes and ears, and just “go about their important foreign policy business,” wreaking murder and mayhem in their wake, while the rest of the world marvels at the enormity of their crimes, and the small-mindedness of the chief criminals.

Kristol’s prescription perfectly expresses the neoconservative view of power and its proper exercise: the common people who pay for our overseas empire have no right to know about, let alone criticize, our overseas shenanigans. Their role is simply to subsidize the whole mess, and let their betters (i.e. Kristol, various Kagan family members, and the laptop bombardiers at AEI and Heritage) determine policy. How dare the hoi polloi interfere!

... beyond the debate on whether to assassinate Assange, blow up the Internet, conduct an unwarranted attack on an NPT signatory that is following the rules, or to continue to ally ourselves with the crazies in Pakistan and Israel, it is important to recognize that fascism of one kind or another is currently embraced by a majority in Congress, and by a large minority across the country. An alert and informed citizenry, valued by presidents from Washington to Eisenhower, is now deemed by D.C. to be a nascent domestic terrorism threat. As the American wholesale subsidy of banks, bullets and butter metastasizes, devouring freedom and wrecking the system, the desperation of the ruling class and those in its employ is palpable

And Justin Raimondo writes that the Political Elite hate Julian Assange of Wikileaks because his organization reveals the truth behind the Propaganda and Lies which governments promulgate day in and day out .

-- Rep. Peter King characterizes WikiLeaks as a “terrorist” organization, but who’s the real terrorist-supporter? Wasn’t it Rep. King who signed a statement of support for the “National Council of Resistance,” a front for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which appears on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations? The MEK has killed American diplomatic personnel, and is described as a fanatic cult by many observers: its supporters, who adhere to a weird combination of Marxism and Islam, were succored by Saddam Hussein in Iraq before the US invasion, where they still persist (under US guard) to this day.

King’s support for terrorism doesn’t stop there, however: he is also a fervent booster of the “Real IRA,” an Irish Republican terrorist organization that plants bombs and assassinates its enemies. As a supporter of Irish Northern Aid, King lent his name and prestige to a group that was buying weapons for the “Real” IRA, which were used to murder civilians as well as British government officials and police.

If anyone should be accused of support for terrorism – material support – it’s King, and the only reason he’s not been charged is because there are two sets of laws in this country, one for us lowly plebs, who might travel to, say, Colombia, or Palestine, and meet with someone our government doesn’t approve of, and another set of laws for the political class, the members of which can do anything ... they damn well please as long as they don’t inconvenience higher-ups in the DC food chain.

Speaking of the political class, listen to William Kristol, the little Lenin of the neocons, as he dispenses advice to the Obama-ites on how to deal with WikiLeaks:

“From now on, a policy of no comment about anything in any of these documents should be the absolute rule. No apologies, no complaints, no explanations, no excuses. No present or former government official should deign to discuss anything in these documents. No one in the executive branch should confirm or deny the accuracy of any document. No one should hasten to reassure any foreign leader of anything, or seek to put any cable in context. No one in Congress should cite anything in these documents to make a point about any issue. The entire American government and political class should simply go about its important foreign policy business, and treat these leaks as beneath contempt, and beneath comment.”

Kristol and his ilk don’t believe they’re answerable to anyone but other members of the “political class” – because, don’t you know, they’re above reproach, or criticism of any kind. Sniffy disdain is the only possible response to any attempt to question their royal prerogatives. These Bourbons have learned nothing in the past decade, during which their failed policies have visited disaster on American foreign policy and the peoples of the Middle East – and, what’s more, they don’t care to learn anything. They would rather close their eyes and ears, and just “go about their important foreign policy business,” wreaking murder and mayhem in their wake, while the rest of the world marvels at the enormity of their crimes, and the small-mindedness of the chief criminals.

Kristol’s prescription perfectly expresses the neoconservative view of power and its proper exercise: the common people who pay for our overseas empire have no right to know about, let alone criticize, our overseas shenanigans. Their role is simply to subsidize the whole mess, and let their betters (i.e. Kristol, various Kagan family members, and the laptop bombardiers at AEI and Heritage) determine policy. How dare the hoi polloi interfere!

(LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, blogs occasionally at Liberty and Power and The Beacon)

- -President Obama is wrong, and Secretary Clinton is wrong. Those remoras of state at CNN, FOXNews, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and many Congressmen are all wet in their frantic response to Cablegate, and Wikileaks in general.

I’ll admit the U.S. government should have been a bit angry about the Wikileaks release over the summer of the 2007 gunship video and narration of a bloody massacre of unarmed Iraqis and reporters. There was nothing redeeming there, no points of light or lessons to be learned. That release fundamentally explained to Americans and others who supported the Iraq invasion and occupation exactly what democracy at the point of a gun looks like. Perhaps the US government wasn’t as upset as it might have been because no one affected by this crime was surprised. Similar massacres, according to soldiers involved in Iraq, were routine and conducted as ordered. The Iraqis, of course, knew this from the beginning.

...But Cablegate is different, and the reaction of the ruling class so far ranges from simply demanding Assange’s head on a platter to demanding the Internet be declared a terrorist entity, and destroyed.

...The US government shrieks, tone-deaf, of global democracy – but disparages the populist language of Italian officials and declares the elected and popular prime minister there to be unqualified. Yet, this same democracy-loving government enjoys very much its dealings with the evilest of dictators. This hypocrisy has long been a staple of both libertarian and Marxist critiques of US foreign policy, for well over a century. Now it’s out in the open – and it’s kind of funny.

Hillary Clinton approves a State Department-wide command to surreptitiously collect DNA and credit card numbers on UN representatives and other diplomats. This particular case is breathtakingly Nuremburgian. The order Hilary was transmitting was already government policy – the great Diplomat Herself was just following orders. ..

But the sweet lesson here is that a government goon is a government goon, just following orders, no matter where they buy their suits...

... beyond the debate on whether to assassinate Assange, blow up the Internet, conduct an unwarranted attack on an NPT signatory that is following the rules, or to continue to ally ourselves with the crazies in Pakistan and Israel, it is important to recognize that fascism of one kind or another is currently embraced by a majority in Congress, and by a large minority across the country. An alert and informed citizenry, valued by presidents from Washington to Eisenhower, is now deemed by D.C. to be a nascent domestic terrorism threat. As the American wholesale subsidy of banks, bullets and butter metastasizes, devouring freedom and wrecking the system, the desperation of the ruling class and those in its employ is palpable.

and the British to prove they are America's lap dog and official quisling ally protected US interests in UK inquiry on the Iraq War. Yes the political elites uninterested in legalities or morality defend each other when they are required to .They are like the members of a fraternity who's first loyalty is not to the public but to each other. (Doug Coe's Christian Extremist organization The Family would of course approve since those in power only answer to each other and their Fascist God)

-- The British government promised to protect America's interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, according to a secret cable sent from the US embassy in London.

Jon Day, the Ministry of Defence's director general for security policy, told US under-secretary of state Ellen Tauscher that the UK had "put measures in place to protect your interests during the UK inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war".

The admission came in the cable sent on 22 September 2009, which recorded a series of high-level meetings between Tauscher and UK defence officials and diplomats, which involved the then foreign secretary, David Miliband.

Day was a senior adviser to the Labour government, and told the American delegation that "Iraq seems no longer to be a major issue in the US", but said it would become a big issue – a "feeding frenzy" – in the UK "when the inquiry takes off".

The revelation of the move to defend Washington threatens to undermine the inquiry, which was launched by Gordon Brown 'to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict'. It is due to deliver its findings around the turn of the year.

The diplomats do not record which measures the British government took to protect US interests. No American officials were called to give evidence in public, and evidence from US officials was heard in private during visits by inquiry members to the US. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between George Bush and Tony Blair written in 2002 in the run-up to the war, even though they were referred to in evidence. There were fears that the release of the details could harm both UK-US relations, and those with other countries. In January, a Blair ally told the Guardian: "They are full of scurrilous remarks about other people, including [Jacques] Chirac [the former French president]."

Tonight, Andrew Burgin, a spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition, was reported as saying: "This shows is the beginning of the cover-up".

"This really brings the whole inquiry into disrepute," he said. "Those involved in this cover-up must be held to account. The implications are so serious that there may need to be a new inquiry."

Those who have accused the US government and its quisling allies of exaggerating the threat of Iran and Korea have been right all along according to these latest revelations from Wikileaks.

— A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile programme refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.

The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish “at the request of the Obama administration”. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly- distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.

As a result, a key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration’s ballistic missile defence policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has produced a spate of stories supporting the existing Iranian threat narrative.

The full text of the U.S. State Department report on the meeting of the Joint Threat Assessment in Washington Dec. 22, 2009, which is available on the Wikileaks website, shows that there was a dramatic confrontation over the issue of the mysterious BM-25 missile.

The BM-25 has been described as a surface-to-surface missile based on a now-obsolete Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27 or SS-N-6. The purported missile is said to be capable of reaching ranges of 2,400 to 4,000 km – putting much of Europe within its range.

The head of the U.S. delegation to the meeting, Vann H. Van Diepen, acting assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, said the United States “believes” Iran had acquired 19 of those missiles from North Korea, according to the leaked document.

But an official of the Russian Defence Ministry dismissed published reports of such a missile, which he said were “without reference to any reliable sources”.

He observed that there had never been a test of such a missile in either North Korea or Iran, and that the Russian government was “unaware that the missile had ever been seen”. The Russians asked the U.S. side for any evidence of the existence of such a missile.

U.S. officials did not claim to have photographic or other hard evidence of the missile, but said the North Koreans had paraded the missile through the streets of Pyongyong. The Russians responded that they had reviewed a video of that parade, and had found that it was an entirely different missile.

The Russian official said there was no evidence for claims that 19 of these missiles had been shipped to Iran in 2005, and that it would have been impossible to conceal such a transfer. The Russians also said it was difficult to believe Iran would have purchased a missile system that had never even been tested.

U.S. delegation chief Van Dieppen cited one piece of circumstantial evidence that Iran had done work on the “steering (vernier) engines” of the BM-25. Internet photos of the weld lines and tank volumes on the second stage of Iran’s space launch vehicle, the Safir, he said, show that the ratio of oxidizer to propellant is not consistent with the propellants used in the past by the Shahab-3.

That suggests that the Safir was using the same system that had been used in the R-27, according to Van Dieppen.

The Russians asserted, however, that the propellant used in the Safir was not the one used in the R-27.

Even more important evidence from the Safir launch that Iran does not have any BM-25 missiles was noted in an authoritative study of the Iranian missile programme published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May.

The study found that Iran had not used the main engine associated with the purported BM-25 to help boost its Safir space-launch vehicle.

If Iran had indeed possessed the more powerful engine associated with the original Russian R-27, the study observes, the Safir would have been able to launch a much larger satellite into orbit. But, in fact, the Safir was “clearly underpowered” and barely able to put its 27 kg satellite into low earth orbit, according to the IISS study.

The same study also points out that the original R-27 was designed to operate in a submarine launch tube, and a road-mobile variant would require major structural modifications. Yet another reason for doubt reported by IISS is that the propellant combination in the R-27 would not work in a land- mobile missile, because “the oxidizer must be maintained within a narrow temperature range”.